We had a great conversation with Yordan Ivanov.
You'll hear about pivoting a million-dollar project, using a calendar to show your real priorities, playing video games as leadership training, and much more! With one important leading theme.
Thank you very much for joining us live and for all the questions we got in the chat!
I encourage you to listen to the full version. But here are my notes from its best parts, slightly edited for clarity:
When something is in quotes, it means that’s Yordan’s words.
Intro:
I’m from Bulgaria.I’ve been in the tech industry for the last 15 years.Started as a software engineer, tried to go into leadership, and had a terrible experience. Restarted my career as a data engineer.And now for the last few years, I’ve been the Head of Data Engineering in a big British fintech company. I’m also writing a newsletter: Data Gibbersish.
Decision-making
Yordan’s most important advice on decision making: ADAPT!
Charles Darwin has this thing where he says that the most adaptive species are the ones that survive.In leadership, in decision-making, you need to adapt quickly.
As with both work and all his projects:
* “your stakeholders don’t know what they really want, so help them by trying small things”
* key advice “split it into small steps” and “test the waters and pivot”
* having a north-star helps! “every decision you make needs to lead you to that big goal”
* decision logs inside a company: “everybody can see what we decided and why we decided, it’s important to be a public thing” (at the company level)
* When to pivot a startup? “test with a few customer/stakeholders drill possible options. Would that work?”, involve teams in decision-making: “when being involved in decision-making because they feel empowered”
On pivoting the BIG project
Yordan gave an example that they spent millions of pounds on a big project, which took two or three years. High sunk cost, and no one stopped it earlier. Finally, they halted it and started from scratch, but why did it take so long?
There’s nobody empowered enough to make decisions. When everybody’s owning a problem, nobody owns it.
Simply noone took ownership of it to halt the project. Inertia was keeping it going for too long.
Video games — as a playground for decision-making
As Yordan is a gamer, we went through transferable learnings from games:
* “make decisions quickly”: we often operate on incomplete information, games show that acting on 60-70% of information is fine
* “make a small step, see what happens... and adjust quickly”: great advice both for playing and experiments in life/work
* “different people think differently”: it helps us work with different people as we play with different players
* “everybody needs to play together to achieve this massive, massive goal”: teamwork in practice, on a much smaller and easier-to-grasp scale than at work.
Productivity
Yordan’s daily operations:
* bullet journaling: with handwritten planning (used in the past)
* calendarising: because by putting everything in the calendar, you clearly see where you invest time and how much time you have
* daily journaling: “I sit and write a message to myself: This is what I’ve done. This is how it made me feel. Deep reflections help me a lot to realise”
* Dear Self: Daily e-mails as a form of making notes, one of Yordan’s projects
Yordan is working full-time, writing his newsletter, and working on a side project. How to achieve that?
Calendar
If someone says they have no time, what does it really mean?
It means there’s something with a bigger priority.
The newsletter
I’ve always liked writing. You get more clarity about what you think and why you think this way.
What’s Data Gibberish name’s origin?
It’s data gibberish because it’s really about everything in the data space. It’s not only technical. It’s not only career level, career advice. It’s everything that people want to talk about.
Trigger to start writing about data engineering?
Yordan started to answer certain questions repeatedly. What is the best way to avoid repeating yourself? Create newsletter content you can link to.
There are no negative consequences of starting a newsletter. Worst-case scenario: you’ll organise your thoughts better, in a written form.
Final thoughts
I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
What was a repeating theme? Adapt! Try new things and change fast. There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, as long as we learn from them and adapt.
Thanks for reading/watching/listening, — Michał
P.S It’s the start of the series “The Brain Stack”, where I uncover how my guests make decisions, and how they operate daily.
Post Notes
You can also listen to its audio version using your favourite podcast app:
* Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Castbox | Pocket Casts
Our first conversation (we referred to it a few times):
Discover Weekly — Shoutouts
Great articles which I’ve read recently:
* How I caught and punished my Substack impersonator 💥 by Tom Orbach
* 7 Slack hacks for engineers and managers by Anton Zaides
* Don’t stay in ‘the waiting place’ by Giacomo Falcone
* AI Fluency Leveling by Alex Ewerlöf
Connect
LinkedIn | Substack DM | Mentoring | X | Bsky
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